Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  Barely a month after signing up for the war, America had witnessed its worst racial riot in decades – and not in the bigoted South but the smug industrial North, in East St Louis. The Midwestern city had seen a recent influx of southern blacks recruited by labour agents to work in its factories. In the face of official discouragement from Mayor Mollman of East St Louis (Mollman had requested an order advising all Louisiana Negroes to stay away from the city), large numbers of blacks had arrived in the last year. East St Louis had been gripped by strikes, and while the white workforce remained locked out, rumours abounded that non-unionised black labourers had been recruited as strike-breakers, and were, in any event, undercutting their white counterparts. Resentment had rumbled on during the course of the year and built, inevitably, towards an explosive peak. The spark for that long-anticipated eruption of violence in East St Louis came on 1 July 1917, when a car filled with plainclothes policemen sped through the black part of town and was fired on by nervous local people who feared its occupants were intent on driving by and shooting. The next morning mobs of heavily armed white men, lugging cans of petrol, descended on the black district and started firing at will at any black person in sight; and setting fire to the district. Local papers reported ‘boot-black Negroes’ pathetically trying to outrun white mobs, and how Negroes were eventually shot down like rabbits, strung up to telegraph poles, and burnt out of their homes.

  Armed men positioned themselves along the railroad tracks with their guns poised to shoot any escaping blacks. The reporter for the St Louis Republic described how, ‘a crazed Negro would dash from his burning home, sometimes with a revolver in his hand. Immediately revolvers by the score would be fired. He would zig-zag through the spaces between buildings. Then a well-directed shot would strike him. He would leap into the air. There were deep shouts, intermingled with shrill feminine ones. The flames would creep to the body. The Negro would writhe, attempt to get up, more shots would be fired.’

  Women also were guilty of the most vile abuses. Carlos F. Hurd, a reporter for the Post-Dispatch, was an eyewitness to the fury of white prostitutes who rounded on black women: ‘I saw Negro women begging for mercy and pleading that they had harmed no one, set upon by white women of the baser sort … [who] beat the Negresses … with fists, stones and sticks.’ Hurd was disgusted by the sight of ‘one of these furies fling[ing] herself at a militiaman who was trying to protect a Negress, and wrestle with him for his bayonetted gun.’

  The worst of the violence culminated in lynchings. In the Post-Dispatch, Hurd, who seems to have decided that the best way to communicate the full horror to readers was to focus on individual events, went on to report, ‘the most sickening incident of the evening when they got stronger rope. To put the rope around the Negro’s neck, one of the lynchers stuck his fingers inside the gaping scalp and lifted the Negro’s head by it, literally bathing his hand in the man’s blood. “Get hold, and pull for East St Louis,” called the man as he seized the other end of the rope. The Negro was lifted to a height of about seven feet and the body left hanging there for hours.’

  Once the mob’s thirst for blood had abated, and men returned home for their evening meals, thousands of black people crept back under the untrustworthy protection of the National Guard to collect essential belongings before fleeing the city. Officially, the death toll was said to be thirty-nine blacks and nine whites. Unofficially, the final figure of black deaths was rumoured to be in the hundreds. On the index of previous civilian horrors, East St Louis was off the scale. Compounding the sense of African-American despair was that these brutal violations occurred while black servicemen trained in military camps and prepared to fight for their country – now at war – and set sail for Europe.

  Du Bois and the NAACP responded by leading 10,000 protestors on a silent march (save for a muffled drum roll) down 5th Avenue in New York. Behind the drummers, women and children carried placards reading ‘MR PRESIDENT, WHY NOT MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY’ and ‘MOTHER, DO LYNCHERS GO TO HEAVEN?’. And in front of the lone dignitary carrying the Stars and Stripes was a banner stretching half across the street bearing the inscription, ‘YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD’.

  East St Louis had shown that black people could not count on the white National Guard to protect them. And if such murder could happen in the Midwest, then it could happen anywhere in the Union. New York may never have witnessed a stranger or more impressive sight than the silent march but Garvey’s reaction was far more visceral. By temperament he was never given to quiet dignified diplomacy: he was much more inclined to make as much noise as he could, and was among the ‘rabble-rousers’ calling for armed self-defence.

  At 3 p.m. on Sunday 8 July, six days after the disastrous destruction of lives and livelihood in East St Louis, Marcus Garvey took to the podium at the Lafayette Hall, New York. Quivering in every fibre, he launched into a step-by-step analysis of the roots of the violence that in some measure would tally with the verdict of the coroner’s later inquest. For more than an hour he held the hushed crowd in a speech that was a prolonged howl of outrage. Pulling together newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts, Garvey addressed an incredulous and emotional audience which groaned, gasped, and cried out in shame as he catalogued the grim details. There’d been a dress rehearsal the month before when black passengers had been pulled from vehicles and beaten; then on 2 July the mob had run amok, burning, maiming and lynching while the National Guard who’d been dispatched hurriedly to the town – but, crucially, without ammunition – stood helplessly to the side.

  Marcus Garvey laid the blame squarely at the feet of Mayor Mollman who ‘fostered a well arranged conspiracy to prevent black men migrating from the South much to the loss of Southern farmers who for months have been moving heaven itself to prevent the exodus of [their] labour serfs … into the North’. Mollman, he believed, had created an atmosphere of hate, a ‘Roman holiday’ where ‘the mob [had] feasted on the blood of the Negro’. To long and pronounced cheers Garvey raged that ‘this [was] no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy’. East St Louis was called a race riot, but really it was a white riot. In his speech that evening, ‘The Conspiracy of the East St Louis Riots’, before several thousand outraged black people, Garvey catalogued the grievous ways in which the Negro had been betrayed:

  The black man has always trusted the white man. He has always clung to him as a brother man … When there was no white man in Africa to help the sickly and dying Livingstone, the black man, ever true, even as Simon of Cyrenia was true, in bearing the cross of the despised Jesus, came to the rescue of the suffering Englishman, and when he was dead, faithful as they were, they bore his body for hundreds of miles across the desert and plains of Africa … The Negro in American history from the time of Crispus Attucks at Boston, the 10th Cavalry at San Juan Hill, which saved the day for Roosevelt, up to the time when they stuck to Boyd at Carrizal, has demonstrated to the American Nation that he is as true as steel. Yet for all his services he receives the reward of lynching, burning and wholesale slaughter.10

  Such horrors were not supposed to happen in America – in Tsarist Russia, perhaps, where Jewish communities cowered in constant fear of pogroms, but even there, the recent Bolshevik revolution spelt the end of such practices. How could a Negro pogrom occur in the land of the free, fifty years on from the Civil War that had ended slavery? The clock had been wound back to the dark days of antebellum life. Nothing good could come of East St Louis. It was a blight on the American landscape: a terrible line had been crossed and the great fear was of explosive repetitions up and down the country.

  East St Louis also signalled a turning point in the life of Marcus Garvey. Henceforth, the improvement of Negro life in America would be his focus. His speech, ‘The Conspiracy of the East St Louis Riots’, announced as much. It was rushed to the printers, made up into a pamphlet and distributed widely throughout black America. The nascent UNIA
would distribute the proceeds from the sale of the pamphlets to those who had suffered in Illinois. And importantly for Garvey, if, as seemed likely, hundreds of copies turned up in the black belts up and down America, his name and his message would became more firmly established in the churches, barbers’ shops and social clubs of his new constituency. Garvey had concluded that another East St Louis was possible because ‘white people are taking advantage of black men today because black men all over the world are disunited’. In particular, it was the Old Testament violence of Garvey’s language – mixed with the spirit of defiance of the new Negro – that thrilled and disturbed.

  Over the coming months, Garvey electrified audiences with speeches in which he exhorted his docile fellow blacks to stand up and fight back. He tapped into a deepening ground swell of fear and resentment. And if Garvey was sounding the alarm bells, as he surely was, then Americans (black and white) would soon be shaken by a frightening reveille on the streets of Houston.

  NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS WANTED

  WHITE MEN

  Married or Single

  EXPERIENCED IN THE HANDLING

  OF COLORED MEN

  For Enlistment as Non-Commissioned Officers in the Service,

  Battalions, Engineer Corps

  NATIONAL ARMY

  So read a typical circular, distributed in connection with the army recruitment stations at Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami, Pensacola and Tallahassee. That was one of the biggest singular problems in the War Department’s approach to the management of its black soldiers. As James Weldon Johnson pointed out, the experience of handling coloured men generally meant having ‘the qualification of a slave driver, of a chaingang guard, or of an overseer of the roughest kind of labour’.11 The problem was compounded by the military high command’s determination to confine Northern black recruits to camps located in the South. These recruits had, largely, not been exposed to the daily humiliations that their black brothers had come to expect in places like Jacksonville, Tallahassee – and especially Houston, Texas. And on the night of 23 August 1917, a battalion of the 24th Infantry – one of the Negro regiments, stationed at Fort Sam Houston – fed up with the ‘Jim Crow’ goading, brutality and beatings meted out to them by the Houston police, had had enough. They broke into the ammunition storerooms, loaded rifles and cut through downtown Houston in military formation, shooting as they went. By the end of their murderous spree nineteen people lay dead, five of them Houston policemen. In the subsequent courts martial, thirteen soldiers would be executed, and more than fifty sentenced to life imprisonment. James Weldon Johnson’s appeal for Woodrow Wilson to show leniency towards the condemned men largely fell on the President’s closed ears.12 This was not totally unexpected from a man who had brought a Southern oligarchy to Washington; a president who, in the teeth of black protest over the racist assertions of the recently released The Birth of a Nation, had arranged for a private screening of the film at the White House. He rubber-stamped its interpretation of post-Civil War reconstruction in which the honourable Ku Klux Klan fought back against the excesses of Northern carpetbaggers and freed slaves. Wilson had said allegedly, ‘It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.’13 After East St Louis and the Fort Sam incident, the USA was like an old tree struck by lightning, more fragile as a result, but still standing. And it was about to learn the painful lesson that would recur in future internal conflagrations – race riots and lynchings – that Negroes would not consent to the role of victim.

  Marcus Garvey instinctively understood this desire for retribution. But the majority of the established African-American leaders thought violence – other than the abstract and intellectual kind – was repugnant. Violence was the path traditionally abjured for practical and moral reasons. In the past, at similar forks in the road, the disarming sacrifice of Uncle Tom was mostly favoured over Nat Turner’s apocalyptic destruction. After all, the slaves and their descendants were in a minority in the USA. They were always going to be outnumbered, and, more importantly, outgunned.

  Events like East St Louis also proved that there was no guarantee of unity amongst the black population. The small number of upper-crust blacks who belonged to elite fraternities like the Society of Sons of New York, certainly didn’t want to be lumped together with their less fortunate brothers. Given the history of America, one could imagine them arguing that it was surprising that there weren’t more East St Louises, more murders and lynching. Amongst these well-to-do blacks, long settled in New York before the arrival of Southern and Caribbean migrants, it was considered almost bad manners to draw too much attention to such outrages. Mary White Ovington, one of the white founders of the NAACP, wrote, ‘The taint of slavery was far removed from these people, who looked with scorn upon arrivals from the South … These old New York colored families, sometimes bearing historic Dutch and English names, have diminished in size and importance … [in relation to] the ambitious men and women, full of the energy and determination of the immigrant.’14 Miss Ovington was one of the first non-blacks to recognise the appeal of Marcus Garvey.

  For the first time, Garvey’s ascension also came to the attention of the newly-formed Bureau of Investigation (BOI) which would soon fuel the growing paranoia of J. Edgar Hoover. Agents had begun to infiltrate street and church-hall meetings in Harlem, bringing back reports that Garvey had advocated, for instance, that ‘for every Negro lynched by whites in the South, Negroes should lynch a white in the North’. Such violent rhetoric wasn’t out of place in Harlem where some intemperate ministers were suggesting that their congregations forgo the uncertainty of prayer and invest in the surety of dynamite.

  The associates of Harrison’s Liberty League, with whom Garvey increasingly aligned himself, were equally militant – even more unguardedly so. Following an earlier violent conflagration, the veteran journalist John E. Bruce had written of the need for resistance and the application of force: ‘If they burn your house, burn theirs. If they kill your wives and children, kill theirs … By a vigorous adherence to this course, the shedding of human blood by white men will soon become a thing of the past.’15 If Garvey hoped to gain a following among those who listened to these men, then he gambled on the need to be just as zealous. He was careful to target his words to his audiences – secret servicemen excepted: such inflammatory invocations were not for the general public’s consumption, and were never included in printed versions of his speeches. As in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey recognised that the custodians of conventional power were invariably white, and he was careful not to ostracise potentially influential and sympathetic patrons.

  If he had harboured doubts before about making an impact in the USA, they were now dispelled: the Jamaican immigrant was on his way. Confirmation could be found in the pages of Home News – ‘For the People of Harlem and the Heights’ – which regularly carried reports on meetings held by ‘Professor Marcus Garvey, late of London University’. In the euphoria of his rise, erroneous details were conveniently left uncorrected. Besides, the title more or less came with the territory. Scholarly black men in Harlem, denied conventional routes to those achievements (that is, being unable to afford the fees that might one day lead to a university degree), tended to write their own narratives. As the Reverend Charles Martin, a migrant from St Kitts, who through diligence and perseverance had established a ministry in Harlem, wryly recorded, among the preachers who elevated themselves to doctors of divinity without the paper qualifications, there was ‘no spot like Harlem for conferring titles’.16 Even the erudite Hubert Harrison – recognised scholar that he was – felt the need to invent a degree from Holland for which he was later roundly reproved. All through his life, Garvey seemed to be drawn to, and to attract, such self-educated men – mirror images of himself.

  By the close of 1917, Garvey had succeeded in luring away most of the key associates of Harrison’s Liberty League and welcomed them into the fold of the nascent Harlem branch of the UNIA. Men such as Samuel A
ugustus Duncan from St Kitts and the Barbadian, Isaac B. Allen, already held claim to some standing amongst Caribbean migrants. Allen, a former longshoreman turned real-estate agent, had scores of West Indian tenants and prospective property owners on his books, and Duncan, as leader of the West Indian Protective Society, offered a trusting hand to newcomers stepping off the banana boats into an uncharted future. Both understood the machinations of the city and of Harlem in particular; both saw in Garvey a spectacular crowd puller, an ambitious and intuitive promoter, and finally, an incomparable egotist. Garvey attracted and repulsed in equal measure. Attraction ultimately won over though, when the cynical but curious journalist John E. Bruce agreed to act as conduit for the UNIA.

  Singularly admired by all the young radicals, John Edward Bruce had integrity and longevity on his side. Born into slavery, he’d followed Union soldiers north to freedom in the 1860s. From the age of eighteen, Bruce had steadfastly developed into an outstanding and campaigning journalist. He adopted the nom de plume ‘Bruce Grit’ in recognition of the grit he put into his pungent prose. In forty years, Bruce Grit had plotted his own race movements, agitated and cajoled through reams of captivating journalistic writings, he made readers laugh at the same time. It was quite an achievement and he was fêted for it, particularly because, as a freelance writer with no secure berth, hunger had continually snapped at his heels. At over six feet tall, with stiff bearing and walrus-like moustache, he could unnerve strangers but his manner belied a kind and generous spirit from which venom only occasionally escaped. Garvey’s path to Bruce could be traced back to London and Dusé Mohamed Ali. Yet another self-educated man, and amateur African archivist, John Edward Bruce had, almost single-handedly, pioneered a unique form of black journalism, connecting the three corners of the former Atlantic slave trade; his journalistic writings reached out to the diaspora, and were included, for example, in the pages of Dusé Mohamed’s African Times and Orient Review.